Prefab Sprout's 'Steve McQueen' at 40

My first glimpse of the four Brits came with a nearby fog eerily receding, as ripped blue jeans, combat boots, popped-collar leather jackets, and a pouty blonde with her arms wrapped around the waist of a slouching man all emerged into focus. “Prefab Sprout,” it said in the top-left corner of the album’s cover. “Steve McQueen,” it said in the top-right corner. Attempting to capture the brooding cool of Virgil Hilts in The Great Escape but settling for The Outsiders extras, they posed around the body of a Triumph motorcycle. I couldn’t help but believe in the photo. That Triumph was gonna take those kids someplace I’d wanna stick around for. However many years later, I listen to Prefab Sprout records for the same reason I watch Sing Street: to hear other people dream their talents into an identity. There are no prerequisites in pop music; you can be yourself or anyone but. And, just as every scene in Sing Street lets the titular band cycle through different wardrobes and genres under the shadow of teenagerdom, Prefab Sprout’s music is a revolving door of equal possibility—of escape, either by foot, by song, or by two wheels.

Brothers Paddy and Martin McAloon called themselves the Dick Diver Band for a year before changing their name to Prefab Sprout, because “all the groups had names like that.” Paddy went to seminary school and nearly became a priest, but rock and roll came a-knockin’ and, by 1977, he’d heard Steely Dan’s Aja and saw a kind of innovative songwriting that instilled jazz tenets with pop flexibility. Around then, he wrote songs called “Hallelujah,” “Goodbye Lucille #1,” “Bonny,” and “Faron Young” but tucked them away. He and his sibling would link up with drummer Michael Salmon and launch their debut single, “Lions in My Own Garden,” in February 1982. Vocalist Wendy Smith would join the ranks later that summer, recording and releasing “The Devil Has All the Best Tunes” with the band soon after.

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Keith Armstrong heard Prefab Sprout’s music in the HMV shop he managed in Newcastle and quickly signed them to his label, Kitchenware Records. “Prefab Sprout were Steely Dan,” Armstrong told Record Collector. The band would gather in Edinburgh and make their first LP, Swoon, on a 24-track for £5,000. It’s a good collection of songs, but far too wordy (much like the name “Prefab Sprout”) and jammed with not only unorthodox chord changes and pretentious melodies, but Paddy’s unrealized lyrical potential. Still, Prefab Sprout had lofty ambitions, hoping to make their own Thriller. But they needed their own Quincy Jones first and, when Swoon snagged the #22 spot on the UK Albums Chart in 1984, it caught the ears of Thomas Dolby—the Abingdon-educated Londoner who’d found success with the Top-5 hit “She Blinded Me With Science” two years prior. His curriculum vitae was promising by age 26, having worked with Robyn Hitchcock, Foreigner, Thompson Twins, and Def Leppard after helping form the band Bruce Woolley and the Camera Club. But, thanks to MTV and a music video cameo from nutritional scientist Magnus Pyke, Dolby earned enough to buy a Fairlight CMI and sought to bring futurism into the mid-‘80s mainstream.

With Dolby producing, Paddy brought in simpler material for Prefab Sprout’s second album, including the moderately successful new single, “When Love Breaks Down.” After rehearsing at Olympia in West London, the band would split time between two studios in the city, Nomis and Marcus, choosing between, by Dolby’s account, “40 or 50” songs. In expelling the McAloon vault, Prefab Sprout had enough material to make Steve McQueen—tracks written in Paddy’s formative, post-Aja phase, when he was 22 years old. New drummer Neil Conti, who came into the lineup with an extensive background in funk and calypso music, was asked by Dolby to play his kit like a drum machine but refused, and Smith found herself learning harmonies through the notes Paddy left on lyric sheets. While tracking guitar parts, Dolby often instructed Paddy to play the bottom strings, filling out the rest of the instrument’s voice with keyboards. Prefab Sprout re-recorded “When Love Breaks Down” and, fearing a less-than-generous response from Steve McQueen’s estate, preemptively changed the album’s title to Two Wheels Good in the States.

Dolby told The Guardian that Paddy’s lyrics “seemed detached from everything except maybe a mid-20th-century American novel,” and I’ve always quite liked that assessment, because Paddy wrote nourishing prose similar to Louis Bromfield’s but with the wry banality of John Updike. See this colloquial achievement in “Faron Young”: “Late sky, like an all-night radio station without morning, like stumbling on Pearl Harbor without warning.” Jim Reid, in an August 1985 piece for Record Maker, wrote that Paddy’s writing was “leav[ing] the crude certainties of the Top 40, and the preening flights of fancy of the bedsit, well and truly kippered.” Under the banner of Prefab Sprout, Paddy was “too nervous a songwriter to incorporate a big chorus,” but his intelligence evoked a strangeness, in prismatic soups of language still lit by contemporary lyricists like Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner and the Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt, both of whom have picked up the proverbial torch for the post-Steve McQueen generations.

When the asteroid comes, this is what we’ll be left with: John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, John Cheever, and Paddy McAloon—authors of vanishing nostalgia delivered in devastating phrase. “I think of songs as objects,” Paddy said 40 years ago. “You’re turning the world to your shape.” Carpe diem, “I can’t breakdance on your knee.” Steve McQueen is an album that arrived already out of time—free of condescension yet replete with humorous badges of infidelity, regret, and Catholic guilt; its influences were disarmingly old-school but its suite of digitally-captured music was impossibly cutting-edge. The songs sound totally ‘80s yet flourish without categorization.

“Antiques!” Paddy’s voice beckons in the first passage of Steve McQueen. “Every other sentiment’s an antique, as obsolete as warships in the Baltic.” Maybe it’s a droll endorsement of his contradictory fashion of music-making, but he did want to be “the Fred Astaire of words” at some point. By 1985, he settled for being a pioneer of sophisti-pop alongside the Blue Nile and the Style Council. But Steve McQueen is a fantastic example of Paddy’s range of interests: His songs feature dapples of Bacharachian melodies, ZTT-patterned electronics, and muscular power chords with Brill Building affectations baked in. He was, after all, as much a student of Sondheim and Gershwin as he was McCartney and Bowie. Prefab Sprout, through his stewardship, had the grandeur of Sinatra and the glamour of Prince. Dolby plugged all of it in and trimmed the fat.

The rockabilly template in “Faron Young”—titled after the Shreveport, Louisiana-born picker, whose hit song “It’s Four In the Morning” is referenced in the chorus—rollicks through “ooh-ah” ephemera and blisters of “boom-chicka-boom” rhythms not unlike the chugging thump of a Tennessee Three backing track. Deeper into the mix, Dolby programmed banjo samples into his Fairlight and invented a cosmic middle-ground between country and electronic music (and the “Truckin Mix” is even better). The album’s middle point, “Hallelujah,” lampoons Donald Fagen and Walter Becker’s sunny, mid-life-crisis flair, while the hot, swinging jazz of “Horsin’ Around” pairs a grab-bag of guitar with programmed horns and ride cymbal pings. Paddy’s breezy croon often blends into Smith’s lush falsetto, especially in the itchy, glammy pocket of “Moving the River.”

Smith’s chants of “Johnny” in “Goodbye Lucille #1” remind me of the titular hook in Randy & the Rainbows’ “Denise,” as an undertow of doo-wop harmonies poke through cable-knit synths and four-note guitar lines doubled by palm-muted textures. Paddy widens into harshness, aching, “No you won’t, no you won’t!” while the instruments distort. He came up with “Appetite” in the summer of 1984, penning a ghostly, third-person verse about a crestfallen mother. “Here she is with two small problems, and the best part of the blame,” he sings. “Wishes she could call him ‘Heartache,’ but it’s not a boy’s name.” Dolby embodies the touch of Quincy here: He locks his rolling, breathy synths into a polyrhythmic counterpoint and, taking a cue from 10CC’s “I’m Not In Love,” feeds a sample of Smith’s backup singing into his Fairlight before weaving the manipulations into a two-part keyboard effect.

“When Love Breaks Down” opens with a cheesy keyboard riff, but then: fragments of blues chords oozing from a Stratocaster, synth teardrops, Smith’s hazy cooing, and an airy siren untwisting. The song’s decorative, repeating “When love breaks down the things you do to stop the truth from hurting you” motif is underscored by quintessential Prefab Sprout lines: “Absence makes the heart lose weight”; “My love and I, we are boxing clever”; “Fall be free as old confetti, and paint the town”; and “You join the wrecks who leave their hearts for easy sex.” The lullaby of “Blueberry Pies” soothes the clever frustrations of “Moving the River,” including the perplexing line, “I’m turkey hungry, I’m chicken free!”

A 28-year-old Paddy plays Confucius on “Desire As,” turning the Chinese philosopher’s “Wherever you go, there you are” axiom into something of his own by singing, “But there it is, and there we are,” with his head. Dolby’s production, fit with playing from guitarist and Bowie collaborator Kevin Armstrong, designed a pattern to be later borrowed by bands like the Radio Dept. and Wild Nothing and contemplating human banality through romantic escapism. Then, out of the film of reverb, a silly, quasi-Tale of Two Cities-recalling memory: “They were the best times, the harvest years with jam to lace the bread.” A 28-year-old Paddy sings the lines “Life’s not complete ‘til your heart’s missed a beat, and you’ll never make it up or turn back the clock” after writing them in his early twenties. A 28-year-old Paddy, grappling with the loss of Marvin Gaye, who’d been shot and killed in April 1984, potently blends the savvy and the sentimental on “When the Angels”—choosing to celebrate, not mourn, Gaye’s accomplishments by singing about heavenly jealousy and the presence of a voice that manifests after death: “Must get so blasé, knowing you’ll never die,” he reckons, pausing between lines. “Lounging on a cloud, polishing the sky, the memories are blue but borrowed for the day.”

In less than two years, we got these albums: A Walk Across the Rooftops, Hounds of Love, Please, and The Colour of Spring. Prefab Sprout played into this emerging, progressive sound, too—ratcheting up their breathy vocal EQ and masking Paddy’s literary doom with cresting jazz euphonies and folktronica pastorals. A half-decade of Thatcherism later, the band’s idyllic deliverances were a necessary, “cowboy” contrast to the rising levels of “aspirational pop” music in England. Had the Replacements not been so drunk and debauched, they would have been America’s greatest compliment to Prefab Sprout. There are more than enough entries into pop relevancy that sound not of this world. Paddy and Dolby’s work together on Steve McQueen, however, challenges the listener to imagine something divine with both feet on the ground. Few songs in the English language speak to that surfacely expanse like “Bonny,” but “Can’t Hardly Wait” comes awfully close.

I certainly heard “When Love Breaks Down” on Vice City FM radio while playing Grand Theft Auto IV almost 20 years ago, but “Bonny” was the first Prefab Sprout song I really listened to. I didn’t find it too early or too late. At some point, it was in my headphones once—a synth expanding in one ear, a piano key tapping feverishly in the other— and then it was in my headphones always. That’s the thing about this band’s music, about Paddy’s writing and Dolby’s production: It’ll meet you where it meets you. And then you’ll hear Paddy McAloon sing, “I count the hours since you slipped away, I count the hours that I lie awake,” and realize that perfect romance has the worst consequences. And then you’ll hear Neil Conti’s drumming and realize it may be the most honeyed drumming sound of all time. And then you’ll hear Wendy Smith’s harmonies and realize you’ve heard that singing a hundred times over, in the voices of Rachel Goswell, Hope Sandoval, and Miki Berenyi. But there is no peer, predecessor, or progeny to compare “Bonny” to.

Right after making Steve McQueen with Prefab Sprout, Dolby found himself on the other side of the world, co-producing Joni Mitchell’s 12th (and worst) album, Dog Eat Dog, at A&M Studios in Hollywood. His penchant for precision—what he called in his memoir a “blinkered way of working”—clashed with Mitchell’s liberal, non-conforming style. Despite her interest in sampling and incorporating found sounds into her music, Mitchell said that Dolby had “a tendency to interior-decorate you out of your songs.” But no part of Dog Eat Dog matches Dolby’s work on “Bonny.” It’s the only song that makes me believe in reincarnation, because: How could anyone possibly conceive something so beautiful out of thin air? Before I ever asked, Paddy McAloon answered, telling the world that Thomas Dolby made his songs on Steve McQueen “into little palaces.”

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.

There It Is and There We Are: Prefab Sprout’s Steve McQueen at 40

In June 1985, the English band’s sophomore album arrived already out of time—free of condescencion yet replete with humorous badges of infidelity, regret, and Catholic guilt; its influences were disarmingly old-school but its suite of digital recordings were impossibly cutting-edge.